John Kirk Receives Library’s 2024 Booker Worthen Literary Prize

Little Rock, AR – The Central Arkansas Library System’s Butler Center for Arkansas Studies will award the annual Booker Worthen Literary Prize to John Kirk, the George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, for his biography Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912–1956, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2022.

Kirk was born and educated in the United Kingdom, where he taught at the University of Wales and the University of London before moving to UA Little Rock in the summer of 2010. He served as History Department chair (2010–2015) and as director of the UA Little Rock Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity (2015–2019). Kirk’s research focuses primarily on the history of the civil rights movement. He has published ten books alongside other work in a wide variety of publications. He has held grants and fellowships in both Europe and the United States, including as Roosevelt Study Centre Fellow (Middleburg, The Netherlands), John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Fellow (Boston), and Rockefeller Archive Center Scholar-in-Residence (New York).

Winthrop Rockefeller covers the first forty-four years of future Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller’s life, a period before he came to Arkansas. It details facts about his early life, his World War II military career, and his years working in the oil fields—background little known to today’s Arkansans. Kirk is working on a second volume on Rockefeller covering his Arkansas years and his tenure as governor.

The Worthen Prize was established by the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) in 1999 in memory of William Booker Worthen, a longtime supporter of the public library and a 22-year member of CALS Board of Trustees. It carries a $2,000 monetary award. It is presented annually for the best work by an author living in Arkansas and published in the three-year eligibility period following publication.